The Last Child

by John Hart

  Johnny cut his eyes to the hall and kept his voice low. “Hello, Jack.”

  “I’ve been looking at some houses on the west side. It’s a bad area. Real bad. Lot of ex-convicts over there. Makes sense when you think about it.”

  It was an old refrain. Jack knew what Johnny did when he cut school and snuck out after dark. He wanted to help, partly because he was a good kid, partly because he was bad.

  “This is not some game,” Johnny said.

  “You know what they say about a gift horse, man. This is free help. Don’t take it for granted.”

  Johnny pushed out a breath. “Sorry, Jack. It’s one of those mornings.”

  “Your mom?”

  Johnny’s throat closed, so he nodded. Jack was his last friend, the only one who still treated him like he was not some kind of freak or pity case. They had some things in common, too. He was a small kid, like Johnny, and had his own share of problems. “I should probably go today.”

  “Our history paper is due,” Jack said. “You done it?”

  “I turned that in last week.”

  “Shit. Really? I haven’t even started mine yet.”

  Jack was always late, and teachers always let him get away with it. Johnny’s mom once called Jack a rascal, and the word fit. He stole cigarettes from the teacher’s lounge and slicked his hair on Fridays. He drank more booze than any kid should and lied like a professional; but he kept secrets when he said he would and watched your back if it needed watching. He was likable, sincere if he cared to be, and for a second, Johnny felt his spirits lift; then the morning landed on him.

  Detective Hunt.

  The wad of greasy bills by his mother’s bed.

  “I gotta go,” Johnny said.

  “What about cutting school?”

  “I gotta go.” Johnny hung up the phone. His friend’s feelings were hurt, but Johnny couldn’t help that. He picked up the plate, sat on the porch and ate his egg with three slices of bread and a glass of milk. He was still hungry when he finished, but lunch was only four and a half hours away.

  He could wait.

  Pouring coffee with milk, Johnny made his way down the dim hall to his mother’s room. The water was gone, so was the aspirin. Her hair was off her face, and a bar of sunlight cut across her eyes. Johnny put the mug on the table and opened a window. Cool air flowed in from the shady side of the house, and Johnny studied his mother. She looked paler, more tired, younger and lost. She would not wake for the coffee, but he wanted it there just in case. Just so she’d know.

  He started to turn, but she moaned in her sleep and made a violent twitch. She mumbled something and her legs thrashed twice, then she bolted up in bed, eyes wide and terrified. “Jesus Christ!” she said. “Jesus Christ!”

  Johnny stood in front of her but she did not see him. Whatever frightened her still had its grip. He leaned in, told her it was just a dream, and for that second her eyes seemed to know him. She raised a hand to his face. “Alyssa,” she said, and there was a question in her voice.

  Johnny felt the storm coming. “It’s Johnny,” he told her.

  “Johnny?” Her eyes blinked, and then the day broke over her. The desperate gaze collapsed, the hand fell away, and she rolled back into the covers.

  Johnny gave her a few seconds, but she did not open her eyes again. “Are you okay?” he finally asked.

  “Bad dream.”

  “There’s coffee. You want any breakfast?”

  “Damn.” She flung off the covers and walked out of the room. She did not look back. Johnny heard the bathroom door slam.

  He went outside and sat on the porch. Five minutes later, the school bus pulled onto the dirt verge. Johnny did not get up, he did not move. Eventually, the bus rolled on.

  —

  It took most of an hour for his mother to get dressed and find him on the porch. She sat beside him, draped thin arms across her knees. Her smile failed in every way, and Johnny remembered how it used to light up a room.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, nudging him with a shoulder. Johnny looked up the road. She nudged him again. “Sorry. You know … an apology.”

  He didn’t know what to say, could not explain how it felt to know that it hurt her to look at him. He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  He felt her look for the right words. She failed in that, too. “You missed the bus,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to the school.”

  “I make perfect grades. Nobody cares if I’m there or not.”

  “Are you still seeing the school counselor?”

  He studied her with an unforgiving eye. “Not for six months now.”

  “Oh.”

  Johnny looked back up the road and felt his mother watching him. She used to know everything. They used to talk. When she spoke, her voice had an edge. “He’s not coming back.”

  Johnny looked at his mother. “What?”

  “You keep looking up the road. You do it all the time, like you expect to see him walking over the hilltop.” Johnny opened his mouth, but she spoke over him. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m just trying—”

  “You don’t know that!”

  Johnny was on his feet with no recollection of standing. His hands were clenched for the second time that morning, and something hot pushed against the walls of his chest. His mother leaned back, arms still crossed over her knees. The light fell out of her eyes, and Johnny knew what was coming. She reached out a hand that fell short of actually touching him. “He left us, Johnny. It’s not your fault.”

  She started to stand. Her lips softened and her face slipped into a look of pained understanding, the kind of expression grown-ups gave to kids who didn’t quite get how the world worked. But Johnny understood. He knew the look and he hated it.

  “You should have never said the things you said.”

  “Johnny …”

  “It wasn’t his fault that she got taken. You should have never told him that.” She stepped toward him. Johnny ignored the gesture. “He left because of you.”

  She stopped midstride and ice snapped in her voice. The sympathetic twist fell from her lips. “It was his fault,” she said. “His fault and nobody else’s. Now she’s gone, and I’ve got nothing.”

  Johnny felt tremors start low in the backs of his legs. In seconds, he was shaking. It was an old argument, and it was tearing them apart.

  She straightened and started to turn. “You always take his side,” she said, and then was gone, into the house, away from the world and her last child’s place in it.

  Johnny stared at the faded door and then at his hands. He watched them shake, then he swallowed the emotion. He sat back down and watched wind move dust on the roadside. He thought about his mother’s words, then he looked up the hill. It was not a pretty hill. There was an edge of ragged forest dotted with small houses and dirt drives, telephone lines that curved between the poles and looked especially black against the new sky. Nothing made the hill special, but he watched it for a long time. He watched it until his neck hurt, then he went inside to check on his mom.

  CHAPTER TWO

  sThe Vicodin bottle sat open on the bathroom counter; the door to his mother’s room was closed. Johnny cracked the door, saw that it was dim inside and that his mother was under the covers and still. He heard the rasp of her breath and beneath that a deep and perfect silence. He closed her door and went to his own room.

  The suitcase under his bed showed cracks in the leather and a black tarnish on the hinges. One of the leather straps had broken off, but Johnny kept the piece because it once belonged to his great-great-grandfather. The case, large and square, had a faded monogram that Johnny could still see if he tilted it right. It read JPM, John Pendleton Merrimon, same name as Johnny.

  He dragged the case out, got it up on the bed, and unfastened the last buckle. The top swung up clumsily and settled against the wall. On the inside curv
e of the lid were a dozen photographs, a collage. Most showed his sister, but two were of them together, looking very much like twins and sharing the same smile. He touched one of the pictures briefly, then looked at the other photos, those of his father. Spencer Merrimon was a big man with square teeth and an easy smile, a builder, with rough hands, quiet confidence, and a moral certainty that had always made Johnny feel lucky to be his son. He’d taught Johnny so many things: how to drive, how to keep his head up, how to make the right decisions. His father taught him how the world worked, taught him what to believe and where to place his faith: family, God, the community. Everything that Johnny had learned about what it meant to be a man, he’d learned from his father.

  Right up to the end, when his father walked away.

  Now Johnny had to question all of it, everything he’d been taught with such conviction. God did not care about people in pain. Not the little ones. There was no such thing as justice, retribution, or community; neighbors did not help neighbors and the meek would not inherit the earth. All of that was bullshit. The church, the cops, his mother—none of them could make it right, none of them had the power. For a year, Johnny had lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own.

  But that’s the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Johnny had nothing to trust but himself, so that’s the way he rolled—his path, his choices, and no looking back.

  He studied the pictures of his father: one behind the wheel of a pickup, sunglasses on and smiling; one standing lightly at the peak of a roof, tool belt angled low on one side. He looked strong: the jaw, the shoulders, the heavy whiskers. Johnny looked for some hint of his own features, but he was too delicate, too fair-skinned. Johnny didn’t look strong, but that was just the surface.

  He was strong.

  He said it to himself: I will be strong.

  The rest was harder to admit, so he did not. He ignored the small voice in the back of his mind, the child’s voice. He clenched his jaw and touched the pictures one last time; then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the emotion was gone.

  He was not lonesome.

  Inside the case were all of the things Alyssa would miss the most, the things she’d want when she came home. He began lifting them out: her diary, unread; two stuffed animals she’d had forever; three photo albums; her school yearbooks; favorite CDs; a small chest of notes she’d passed in school and collected like treasure.

  More than once, his mother had asked about the things in the case, but Johnny knew better than to tell her. If she mixed the wrong pills anything could happen. She’d throw things out or burn them in the yard, standing like a zombie or screaming about how much it hurt to remember. That’s what happened to the other photos of his father, and to the small, sacred things that once filled his sister’s room. They faded away in the night or were consumed by the storms that boiled from his mother.

  On the bottom of the case was a green file folder. Inside the folder was a thin stack of maps and an eight-by-ten photo of Alyssa. Johnny laid the photo aside and spread out the maps. One was large scale and showed the county where it nestled into eastern North Carolina, not quite in the sand hills, not quite in the piedmont or the flood plains; two hours from Raleigh, maybe an hour from the coast. The northern part of the county was rough country: forest and swamp and a thirty-mile jut of granite where they used to tunnel for gold. The river came down from the north and bisected the county, passing within a few miles of town. To the west was dark soil, perfect for vineyards and farms, and to the east were the sand hills, which boasted a crescent of high-end golf courses, and, beyond that, a long string of small, poor towns that barely managed to survive. Johnny had been through some of them, and remembered weeds that grew from the gutters, shuttered plants and package stores, staved-in men who sat in the shade and drank from bottles in brown paper bags. Fifty miles past the last of the failed towns, you hit Wilmington and the Atlantic Ocean. South Carolina was a foreign country beyond the edge of the paper.

  Johnny tucked the big map back into the folder. The rest of the maps detailed the streets in town. Red ink marked a number of streets, small X marks over individual addresses. Notes in his handwriting lined the margins. Some neighborhoods were still untouched; a few were crossed off completely. He looked at the western side of town, wondering what part of it Jack had been talking about. He’d have to ask him. Later.

  Johnny studied the map for a few more seconds, then folded it and set it aside. Alyssa’s things went back into the case and the case back under the bed. He picked up the large photo and slipped a red pen into his back pocket.

  He was through the front door and about to lock it when the van turned into his driveway. Paint peeled from the hood in uneven patches; the right front fender was banged up and rusted. It slewed into the driveway with a shudder, and Johnny felt something like dismay. He turned his back, rolled up the map, and shoved it into the pocket that held the pen. He kept the photo in his hand so that it would not get wrinkled. When the van stopped, Johnny saw a flash of blue through the glass; then the window came down. The face behind it was unusually pale and bloated.

  “Get in,” the man said.

  Johnny stepped off the stoop and crossed the small patch of grass and weed. He stopped before he got to the edge of the drive. “What are you doing here, Steve?”

  “Uncle Steve.”

  “You’re not my uncle.”

  The door squealed open, and the man stepped out. He wore a blue jumpsuit with a gold patch on the right shoulder. The belt was heavy and black. “I’m your father’s first cousin, and that’s close enough. Besides, you’ve called me Uncle Steve since you were three.”

  “Uncle means family, and that means we help each other. We haven’t seen you in six weeks, and it was a month before that. Where have you been?”

  Steve hooked his thumbs in the belt, making the stiff vinyl creak. “Your mom is hanging with the rich folks now, Johnny. Riding the gravy train.” He waved a hand. “Free house. No need to work. Hell, son, there’s nothing I can do for her that her boyfriend can’t do a thousand times better. He owns the mall, the theaters. He owns half the town, for God’s sake. He doesn’t need people like me getting in his way.”

  “Getting in his way?” The disbelief came off Johnny in waves.

  “That’s not—”

  “You’re scared of him,” Johnny said in disgust.

  “He signs my paycheck, me and about four hundred other guys. Now if he was hurting your mom, or something like that. That’d be one thing. But he’s helping her. Right? So why would I get in his way. Your dad would understand that.”

  Johnny looked away. “Aren’t you late for your shift at the mall?”

  “Yes, I am. So get in.”

  Johnny did not move. “What are you doing here, Uncle Steve?”

  “Your mom called and asked if I could take you to school. She said you missed the bus.”

  “I’m not going to school.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Jesus, Johnny. Why do you have to make everything so damn difficult? Just get in the van.”

  “Why don’t you just tell her that you took me and leave it there?”

  “I told her I’d take you, so I have to take you. I’m not going anywhere until you get in the van. I’ll make you if I have to.”

  Johnny’s voice dripped. “You’re not a cop, Steve. You’re just a security guard. You can’t make me do anything.”

  “Screw this,” Steve said. “Wait right there.” He pushed past Johnny and small metal jingled on his belt. The uniform looked very crisp and made a rasping noise between his legs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Talking to your mother.”

  “She’s asleep,” Johnny said.

  “I’ll wake her then. Don’t you go anywhere. I mean
it.” Then he was through, into the small house that smelled of spilled booze and generic cleaner. Johnny watched the door click shut, then looked at his bike. He could be on it and gone before Uncle Steve made it back outside, but that’s not what a strong person would do. So Johnny pulled the map from his pocket and smoothed it against his chest. He took a deep breath, then went inside to deal with the problem.

  It was quiet in the house, the light still dim. Johnny turned into the short hall and stopped. His mother’s door angled wide, and Uncle Steve stood in front of it, unmoving. Johnny watched for a second, but Steve neither moved nor spoke. As Johnny drew closer, he could see a narrow slice of his mother’s room. She still slept, flat on her back, one arm thrown across her eyes. The covers had fallen to her waist, and Johnny saw that she was undressed, so still, and Uncle Steve just stood there, staring. Then Johnny understood. “What the hell?” Then louder: “What the hell, Steve?”

  Uncle Steve twitched in guilt. His hands came up, fingers spread. “It’s not what you think.”

  But Johnny wasn’t listening. He took five quick steps and pulled his mother’s door closed. She still had not moved. Johnny put his back to the door, and felt the fire come up in his eyes. “You’re sick, Steve. She’s my mother.” Johnny looked around, as if for a stick or a bat, but there was nothing. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Uncle Steve’s eyes showed rare desperation. “I just opened the door. I didn’t mean anything by it. Swear to God, Johnny. I’m not like that. I’m not that kind of guy. I swear it. Hand to God.”

  A sheen of greasy sweat slicked Uncle Steve’s face. He was so scared, it was pitiful. Johnny wanted to kick him in the balls. He wanted to put him on the ground, then find the pipe under his bed and beat his balls flat. But he thought of Alyssa’s picture, and of the things he still needed to do. And he’d learned this year. He’d learned how to put emotion last. His voice came cold and level. He had things to do, and Steve was going to help him. “You tell her you took me to school.” Johnny nodded and stepped closer. “If she asks, that’s what you tell her.”